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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

Don't you see how that platform is more patronizing than "I'll bring the jobs back home"? It's far more appealing to hear that your jobs were taken by cheap Chinese labor than to hear that your skills are out of date and you need training.

It doesn't actually matter in this case who is right—as I said, they're wrong about the medicine—what matters is who understands the human beings who vote better. And Trump understood these people better than any member of the establishment in either party, which is why he was able to hijack one and defeat the other.

Inventing stories about how half the country just wants the other half to hurt won't help win the midterms and the next presidency. We have to get past that and actually look at what Trump voters truly believe, then speak to them as real people, not strawmen.

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I may be old fashioned, but it actually does matter who is right. Because reality is a thing.

Being a leader means understanding the reality of a situation, developing a strategy, and understanding where people are so you can get them on board and all work together to improve things.

It does not mean “understanding people” so you can pander to their misunderstandings and prejudices, and take all the power for yourself while making their situation even worse.

Before you can be a leader people have to follow you, and in democracies people have to vote for you. And the unfortunate reality is that reality doesn't matter for elections, only the perception of reality matters.

So if you want to be a leader, you have to start by understanding people and, yes, pandering to them. There's a reason why too many of our powerful politicians have been essentially indistinguishable from sociopaths.

Yes, the question is what end are they devoting their sociopathic skills toward? And isn’t it the most “patronizing” thing of all to believe that people are too stupid to see that when they vote?

So far Trump 2.0 has done exactly what he promised he would, and his supporters are quite happy. If his actions don't lead to the outcomes he promised that may change, as long as someone else who understands the needs can offer an alternative.

I think we did that experiment in November, and it doesn’t support your assertion that people suddenly turn into rational performance evaluators after the election (or in this case an entire first term).

In any case, this time around the likelihood is Trump will be long dead (of natural causes, I mean) before the impact of this election is realized. The change happening right now is generational in scale. The voters’ children will be reading this chapter in their history book and asking what on earth they were thinking.

In electoral democracies people have to vote for you.

> I may be old fashioned, but it actually does matter who is right. Because reality is a thing.

Is that a position you hold consistently? Is there anything you believe that you wouldn’t be swayed on when presented evidence to the contrary of your belief?

I ask, because there is an awful lot of mainstream Republican and (here’s the controversial bit) Democrat thought that simply has no basis in reality.

All humans do that. The question is, do you want elect someone who seems to be better at perceiving reality according to evidence than yourself, or worse?

I'd love to have that choice. Neither the Republican nor Democrat party in 2025 offers me that.

Well, then you have to fall back on whether one of them is at least better at it than the other, and it’s hard to believe that would be a difficult decision at the moment.

That's one option. Another option is to reject that either major party offers a sane choice and vote for a third party.

Unless the election already has an obvious winner so your vote doesn’t matter, that’s just silly. Write an editorial if you’re unhappy with the choice, but don’t throw away your vote and just roll the dice as if you’re indifferent to the two alternatives. (And if you really were indifferent to the alternatives this time around, I don’t know what to say.)

It does not mean “understanding people” so you can pander to their misunderstandings and prejudices, and take all the power for yourself while making their situation even worse.

It does mean “understanding people” so you can pander to their misunderstandings and prejudices, and take all the power to do whatever you wanted to do. Their prejudices are the real part of reality.

Politicians who forget this fact get owned.

This is such an important point, and why I believe the Dems constantly "get owned".

Frankly, everyone has prejudices, some stronger than others, but the Dems made it part of their ethos that if you even acknowledge having some of these prejudices that you're a bigot. But their fatal flaw is the Dems convinced themselves that very few people harbor these beliefs.

Very real strategic case in point: I think it sucks that this is our current reality, but the American populace at large has now shown multiple times that they are not willing to elect a woman from the managerial class as President. It's not just Dems (e.g. Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris) but Republican women have also been rejected multiple times (e.g. Nikki Haley, Carly Fiorina). I am not in any way saying being female is the only reason these candidates were rejected (indeed, I think one flaw on the Democratic side is that they pushed this "they just hate women" narrative too strongly), but in a ~50/50 electorate, a few percentage points makes all the difference.

So the problem for the Dems is they want to appeal to this "higher nature", but, again, as much as I may personally not like to believe this, I strongly think that if they put forth another woman at the top of the ticket in the near future that they will lose, again.

You realise Trump won right?

"I'll bring the jobs back home" seems vastly more patronizing to me. That's just telling people they're stuck with their lot and shouldn't try to improve their situation because daddy GOP will take care of them.

The reality is most people are stuck with their lot, and that’s the point. These people understand the reality a lot better than the people making promises of retraining.

What? You think these people are literally incapable of learning to work on a solar farm instead of a coal mine? Why?

>It's far more appealing to hear that your jobs were taken by cheap Chinese labor than to hear that your skills are out of date and you need training.

Training for what? What if our population of working age people is far larger than our economy's ability to absorb whatever sort of service worker you imagine they should be training to become? Given a fixed total population, there's only room for x masseuses or y graphic artists. If we have n unemployed people needing training, and that number is higher than x and y combined (for any sort of x and y), telling them to retrain doesn't solve their problem. Some are going to lose out. The truth of the matter is that by offshoring manufacturing, we created an economy where there is a surplus of ultimately unemployable people.

A message of training isn't just bullshit, it's transparent bullshit. Most people have an intuition that this is the case, after all. As for midterms, both the Republican and Democratic parties have a different strategy. They will simply import voters who will vote for them. H1Bs for the GOP, and the remainder of the naturalization pipeline for the Ds. It's slow, but they're willing to put in the longterm effort.

Training for construction and manufacturing jobs. A lot of HN users don't seem to realize this but the USA is re-industrializing at an accelerating rate as the globalized system breaks down. The electric grid is growing fast due to higher demand including generation, transmission, and storage. The chemicals and plastics industries are booming due to cheap natural gas from fracking. Ocean shipping routes are getting slower, more hazardous, and more expensive. China's labor cost advantage is eroding due to demographic collapse and horrendous central planning policies (the USA has its own challenges in those areas but overall we're in better shape).

Yes I too have read the Peter Zeihan worldview but let me present the alternative worldview just to provide another viewpoint: The Chinese are amazingly industrious and won't take this challenge lying down.

The Musk supporters feel that universal automation is coming fast and I bet the Chinese being as industrious as they are will seize upon that to make up for their demographic issues. They are already he world leaders at renewables and nuclear and regardless, their ability to ramp up carbon based fuel sources is second to none.

Meanwhile the US appears to have an okay demographic pyramid(especially compared to their peers) but birth rates are declining and all the ingredients to increasing birthrate are not in the upswing (good incomes, cheap real estate, stable governance). Now you are killing off the US's golden goose (immigration) it seems like you are repeating the mistakes of China.

>Training for construction and manufacturing jobs.

Hillary famously said "those jobs aren't coming back". I do not know if she was incorrect in that, but I suspect she might have been right. I don't see a viable path to that happening, and I've yet to hear anyone else describe such.

We’re talking about the “fuck your feelings” crowd right?

Fuck your feelings. Take their feelings very seriously.

Again, it doesn't really matter if you like them or think they're mature in their attitudes and approach, they've now proven that you can't win elections without them. Figure out how to appeal to them or watch us descend into decades of Trumpism.

... but appealing to them would mean descending into decades of Trumpism, because that's what they want.

They don't want to be appealed to, nor do they intend to compromise. They want to tear down everything I value, burn it to the ground, piss on the ashes and put me up against the wall. I know this because they've told me precisely that, and have been telling me that for nearly a decade. They've been very vocal and clear about what they want, and it isn't to be understood, or to meet anyone halfway.

I'm tired of being told that I need to capitulate and surrender and understand why I deserve the bullet. Fuck that, and fuck them.

Trumpism Delenda Est.

See, this is exactly why I felt the need to speak up. Trumpism isn't what they want, it's just the closest thing to what they want that's been offered. And if you let Trump be the only person who speaks to them for the next 10 years, you might actually find they they begin to believe that it is in fact the real thing.

The economic woes come first, and it's still not too late for a left-leaning populist to take charge of the Democrats and give the people what they need while protecting minorities and LGBT folks. The only way we get to the social justice disaster that people are predicting is if we all collectively throw up our hands and write off 50% of the voters as a lost cause.

The trouble with this argument is that if what they want is to keep the coal mines running, no one can give them that. If it’s a disqualifying event to tell them that fact and offer to help, then it seems like we’re on a dead-end road. The election goes to the people who lie about it to gain power and still do nothing about it, or make it worse.

E.g., the party who actually succeeded in doing something about health insurance just lost to the party who did everything in their power to stop it, and who immediately decided to decimate Medicaid when they took over. So you can give the people what they need and still get punished for it.

We've been hearing what they are asking for and what they are saying. The push back that Romney and McCain got from their own voters because they wouldn't attack Obama as a foreign Muslim. What will it take for people to believe that people who state "He's not hurting the people he's supposed to be hurting" actually want to hurt people. We don't want the same things with different paths to get there. We have fundamentally different values.

I like how Trump is not what they want only when there is a need to deflect the blame. But when someone needs to deflect blame from Trump, then he is doing exactly what his voters want.

And somehow, when left and democrats are doing something bad, left and democrats are to be blamed. And when conservatives or right do something bad ... left and democrats are to be blamed.

> The economic woes come first

No they do not. Trump does not make economy better, you know it, they know it, I know it. It is not about removing fraud or corruption, Trump is fraudster and they know it, you know it and Trump himself knows it.

It was a stream of lies and hate that won and people voted for. It has nothing to do with economic policies that could help these people or not. Pretending to yourself that some rational policy can counteract it is how you loose.

Trumpism is what they wanted. It's what they voted for. They made it their identity, religion and basis for their worldview.

Not one of them could name a single policy position Kamala Harris or Joe Biden had. Part of the reason for that is the dismal and pathetic ability of the Democrats to actually sell themselves, because they assumed just not being Trump would be enough. It should have been, but it wasn't, because Americans are the worst. But the other part is that Trumpists wouldn't have listened, nor would they have cared, regardless of what was offered. They were never going to listen to a "left-leaning populist." These people thought Hillary Clinton was a baby-eating Marxist. They set up a gallows on the Capitol. They saw the price of eggs was too high and the videogames were too woke and decided they wanted to watch the world burn. That's it.

I want social justice. I want UBI. I want socialized healthcare and education. I want a liberal, secular, social democratic society with robust labor laws, a boring and stable government, and a strong social safety net. I want to spend more of my tax dollars on infrastructure and fewer on murdering brown people for God and the almighty petrodollar. I want feminism and black liberation and gay and trans rights. I want land back. I want fully automated luxury space communism. I want science and scholarship. And a lot more Americans align with my views than the popular narrative would have you believe. We even won the popular vote in 2016, not that it matters. All of these things would help Trumpists more than Trump's own policies. Not that it matters. Hillary Clinton said a mean thing about them one time and the screaming in their head has never stopped. She was absolutely correct, though, and the right could have taken the chance to clean their own house instead of trauma-bonding with the worst elements in their ranks. Not that it matters.

But I can't have that. Obviously not from the Republicans, but neither from the Democrats. I can have whatever Snow Crash Handmaid's Tale cyberpunk dystopian nightmare the orange gibbon and his ketamine-tweaking puppetmaster cook up, and 20 years from now I guess can just die in a ditch of hunger and dysentery because JimmyDingleberry or whomever in Musk's cult of groyper fuckbois deleted Social Security and because vaccines were declared fake and gay in the Soyjak purge of 2030.

These are not rational people, and this is not a rational government. I'm not going to give them the dignity of pretending otherwise.

No I believe this discussion is about the majority of voting Americans.

The majority of voting Americans live in cities and have jobs, so I don't think that's right.

Ah, so it’s the fault of the _workers_ that the rich decided not to invest in them or their factories and instead exported their jobs overseas?

What you say meshes with my understanding. The crux is how do we even pull up from this? It has essentially been the Republican playbook for the past few decades - the politicians enact backdoored policies that make things even worse, while personally looting and maintaining support with identity politics. Trump's main differences are the lack of usual political decorum, the level to which he's doing it, and how much his actions are openly benefiting foreign powers.

The tough nut to crack is that it is impossible to talk with red tribe voters about any of this! You can sit there and listen, of course. But as soon as you say anything that still addresses their frustration and pain, but yet diverges from their overly-simplistic party chorus, you're now part of the "other" that is eagerly responsible for their problems and will just be reflexively argued with.

And the situation has gotten so bad that lighter touch individual-freedom-respecting solutions (that they could possibly agree with in theory) aren't likely to even work now. For example twenty years ago, stopping the profligate government spending and handouts to banks could have stopped rural economies from continuing to get hollowed out. Allowing deflation in consumer goods would have allowed main street to experience some of the gains from offshoring. Re-setting the definition of full time employment to 40 hours per household per week would have slowed down the financial grindstone.

Instead these days we're basically down to direct government stimulus to create new jobs - directly at odds with the medicine they think they need. Or even worse, completely uninspiring answers like UBI.

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